>> From the Library of
Congress in Washington, D.C.
[ Silence ]
>> Hello everyone.
Welcome to the Library of
Congress this afternoon.
My name is Rob Casper.
I'm the head of the Poetry
and Literature Center
here at the Library.
And I would like to welcome
to you today's lecture,
Poetry as Enchantment
with Dana Gioia.
Before we begin let me ask you
to turn off your cell phones
and any other electronic
devices that you have
that might interfere with our event.
It does pick up on the RF frequency
so it's good to have those off.
Second, please note
that as you can see
from the back this program
is being video recorded.
And by participating in the question
and answer period you give the
Library of Congress permission
for future use of this recording.
Let me tell you also a
little bit about the Poetry
and Literature Center here
at the Library of Congress.
We are home to the Poet
Laureate Consultant in Poetry.
Our 20th Poet Laureate
is Charles Wright.
And in addition to supporting
the Laureate we put on readings,
lectures and panels of all
sorts throughout the year,
both in the afternoon
and also in the evening.
To find out more about events like
this and to help our Poet Laureate
and the Library Champion Poetry and
Literature you can visit our website
which is www.loc.gov/poetry.
You can also pick up our featured
events handout and sign our sign
up sheet which is out in the foyer.
Now, onto the event this afternoon.
For approximately 45 minutes Mr.
Gioia will discuss the relationship
between poetry and music
and explore the ways
in which poetry achieves its
special expressive power.
We will leave time
afterwards for your questions.
And following the event Mr. Gioia
will be happy to sign books.
You can find copies of his
latest poetry collection,
Pity the Beautiful,
and his influential books
of essays, Can Poetry?
also out in the foyer for sale.
And hopefully by the end
of the event the credit
card machine will be working
so you can buy with credit cards.
You can learn more about
our featured speaker
in our print program which
should be on your seats.
Or, if you didn't get one,
there's one next to you.
But let me tell you
that there are few
if any poets I would trust
completely to give a brilliant,
accessible and necessary lecture
on poetry as I do Dana Gioia.
As an acclaimed practitioner
and influential commentator,
a translator and editor, Gioia
has been a tireless advocate
for the art.
As Chairman for the NEA
he brought this dedication
to all our arts on a national level.
His lecture today will surely show
how our creative expression in words
and in song can continue
to deepen our lives.
Please join me in welcoming
Dana Gioia.
[ Applause ]
>> Good afternoon.
Although for me it's good morning
because I'm still on
West Coast time.
It's always a special occasion for
an American poet or writer to speak
at the Library of Congress
not simply
because it is the largest library in
the world which in itself is a cause
for awe and wonder, but also
because this institution dates back
to the early days of the republic,
the early endangered
days of the republic.
And it symbolized from the
beginning the importance of language
and the learning in a free society.
Poets love a symbol, and it
seems to me that the Library
of Congress is a symbol
worth loving.
Everyone here today shares
something of great significance,
though a few of you may be too
well armored in irony to admit it.
We have all dedicated at
least some part of our lives
to the indispensable importance of
language and literature in shaping,
expanding and refining
human consciousness.
We believe in the transformative
power of language and literature,
transformative power of
reading in shaping the lives
of individuals and in communities.
And we hold these beliefs in
a period of cultural crisis
when the society around us,
including government officials
and academic administrators who
fund and supervise libraries,
universities and cultural centers
no longer necessarily share
our convictions.
Now, I mention this disjunction
between our values and those
of the larger society not to
complain about the situation.
We all know that if we wanted money
and celebrity it was probably a
bad idea to dedicate ourselves
to language and literature.
I refuse to be cynical about our
calling whether it be as writers,
teachers, librarians or
simply serious readers.
We enjoy the rare privilege of
doing work we love and value
and playing a part in the
continuity of that great,
mysterious enterprise
known as literature.
Today I will talk about
an essential part
of that vast imaginative enterprise,
namely the art of poetry.
I want to take a deliberately
broad perspective on the subject
so that we can puzzle out one of the
oddest but most essential aspects
of poetry, something that is mostly
overlooked today, namely the mystery
of its emotional and
imaginative power that grew
out of a deep historical connection
between poetry and music and magic.
But first to remind us
of the actual phenomenon
that we will be discussing
necessarily
in abstract terms let's
listen to a poem
to understand that music and magic.
This is a poem by Robert Frost
called acquainted with the night.
I have been one acquainted
with the night.
I have walked out in
rain and back in rain.
I have outwalked the
farthest city light.
I have looked down
the saddest city lane.
I have passed by the
watchman on his beat
and dropped my eyes
unwilling to explain.
I have stood still and
stopped the sound of feet
when far away an interrupted cry
came over houses from another street
but not to call me
back or say goodbye.
And further still at an
unearthly height one luminary cog
against the sky proclaimed the
time was neither wrong nor right.
I have been one acquainted
with the night.
It's intimidating to say that
with Robert Frost's granddaughter
in the room.
I am not a scholar.
I am a poet, a critic,
a former civil servant,
and for half of each
year now a professor.
A kind of pathetic resume don't you
think if it came across your desk.
I had just enough early training and
scholarship at Stanford and Harvard
that under pressure I can
successfully imitate a scholar
for about an hour.
But today I don't want to speak
in the lofty and remote dialect
of contemporary literary criticism.
I'm going to speak in a public
idiom, the sort of English
to quote the poet Randall Jarrell
that dogs and cats can understand.
So I speak to you not
simply as a poet,
but above all as a fellow reader
and fellow lover of poetry,
an amateur in the root
meaning of that wonderful word.
But first let me begin with
three crucial observations
about the art of poetry.
First, poetry is the
oldest form of literature.
Indeed it is the primal
form of all literature.
Poetry predates history itself
because it not only existed
but flourished before
the invention of writing
as an oral performative art.
In fact, before writing
poetry, or if you wanted
to be technical you could say verse,
stood at the very center of culture
as the most powerful way
of remember, preserving
and recreating the
identity and stories
of a tribe, a culture, a nation.
Verse was humanity's first
broadcast technology,
a technology that was
performed by the human body.
Poetry was also, to use Robert
Frost's astute formulation,
a way of remembering what it
would impoverish us to forget.
Frost's definition is ponderable,
a way of remembering which is
to say a pneumonic technology
to preserve human experience,
what it would impoverish
us, which is to say
that poetry enriches
human consciousness
or at least protects it from some
sort of depredation to forget.
And here Frost acknowledges
the very center of the art,
the natural forces of time,
mortality and oblivion
against which humanity
finds its meaning.
As Frost said elsewhere, one of
the essential tasks of poetry is
to give us a clarification of life,
a momentary stay against confusion.
My second observation is that
poetry is a universal art.
Despite the theories of
cultural relativism propounded
by most modernists that there
are no cultural human universals,
there is a massive and compelling
body of empirical data collected
and documented by anthropologists,
linguists, archeologists
and more recently by
cognitive scientists
that demonstrate there is no
human society, however isolated,
that has not developed and employed
poetry as a cultural practice.
We are talking, of course,
mostly about oral poetry.
Many of these cultures
never developed writing.
And it is a demonstrable
fact, not an opinion,
that poetry is a universal
human enterprise.
That in every society they
have developed a special class
of speech shaped by
apprehensible patterns
of sound which is to say poetry.
In fact, cognitive science now
suggests that humans are hardwired
to respond to the sort of pattern
speech that poetry represents
like the songs of birds,
the dances of bees.
But on a higher level of
complexity poetry reflects part
of the unique cognitive capacity
of the human mind and body.
Now, why humanity universally
needs poetry as a special class
of speech is another
question entirely
which I'll explore in a few moments.
Third and finally poetry began as
an auditory performing art linked
to music and dance and through
those features to civic ceremony,
religious ritual and magic.
Most Aboriginal cultures
do not distinguish poetry
from song or even from dance.
Nor did the classical Greek
and Chinese cultures two
or three millennia ago
differentiate poetry in song.
For them it was the same art.
Poetry was performative, either
chanted rhythmically or sung.
Sometimes as in the Greeks
sung and danced on chorus.
Purely verbal forms of poetry
only emerged gradually,
poetry written on and for the page.
But even then there was
reluctance among poets
to sever the connection
between singer and poet.
We hear the poet as
singer evoked continuously
through western literature,
Virgils [phonetic], Arma [phonetic],
Rerumque [phonetic],
Cannoi [phonetic]
of Arms in the Man I sing.
John Milton's sing Heavenly Muse.
W.B. Yeats's Irish poets learn your
trade, sing whatever is well made.
Even when Walt Whitman published the
Central Work of American Free Verse
in a book produced by
mechanical typography,
he did not title it Book of Myself.
He called it Song of Myself.
Whitman wanted to evoke the physical
proximity of singer and audience.
I sing the body electric, the armies
of those I love engirth
me and I engirth them.
Just as Ezra Pound later called the
modernist epic the Cantos his form
was fundamentally visual
and typographic.
But he named it Cantos, the
Italian word for song or chant.
We might even take this
notion to a metaphysical level
as Rainer Maria Rilke did
in his Sonnets to Orpheus.
[Foreign Language] Rilke
asserts, singing is being.
Some of you may recognize
this German phrase
since in another context
Lady Gaga has it tattooed
onto her arm [foreign
language] Gaga.
[Laughter] Poets understand
the power of song both real
and metaphorical in its physical
and emotional connection
to the listener.
As Italian critics said about opera
and song primar la musica
[phonetic] [foreign language],
first the music then the words.
That hurts be as a
librettist, but it's true.
Even to this day poetry speaks
most effectively and inclusively,
whether in free or formal verse,
when it recognizes its connection
without apology to its musical
and ritualistic origins.
The musical nature of
poetry is one reason why,
to quote T.S. Eliot's
observation about Dante,
genuine poetry can communicate
before it is understood.
I would like to have that written
over the arches of
English departments.
Genuine poetry can communicate
before it is understood.
Just as music and dance
can communicate in ways
that are physical and sensory
rather than conceptual.
Now, there was a wonderful study
done about 20 years ago to try
to determine which poems
in the English language had
been reprinted most frequently.
And most people were astonished
to discover the most
widely anthologized poem
in the English language is
William Blake's The Tiger.
Tiger, tiger, burning bright
in the forests of the night,
what immortal hand or eye could
frame thy fearful symmetry.
In what distance deeps and skies
burnt the fire of thine eyes.
On what wings dare he aspire,
what the hand dare seize the fire.
And what shoulders and what art
could twist the sinews of thy heart,
and when thy heart began to beat
what the hand and what the feet,
what the hammer, what the chain,
in what furnace was thy brain,
what the anvil what dread grasp
dare its deadly terrors clasp.
When the stars threw down
their spears and watered heaven
with their tears did he
smile his work to see.
Did he who made the lamb made thee?
Tiger, tiger burning bright,
in the forests of the night,
what immortal hand or eye dare
frame thy fearful symmetry.
A dream vision of God as a
blacksmith in the foundry
of creation hammering
a burning predator.
This is not a poem that I think
anyone in the audience would
like to stand up and
explain in conceptual terms.
Great scholars have riddled out
the complex mythology and ideology
of the lines although they're
always disagreeing with one another.
But these mysterious lines have
been loved and cherished by millions
of readers who have no idea
in conceptual terms
what they represent.
Perhaps it would be better to
say that auditors recognize
that the tiger is a
song of experience.
Not a philosophical, not
a philosophy experience,
but listeners love the
poem as a tune, a song,
a magic spell that
summons up powerful images
and awakens deep emotions.
Now, this is not to diminish
the value of criticism.
My point is rather that part of
poetry's power has little connection
with conceptual knowledge.
It's deeply significant that the
Latin word for poetry, Carmin,
is also the word the Romans
used for a song, a magic spell,
a religious incantation
and a prophecy all
of which are verbal constructions
whose auditory power can produce a
magical effect on the listener.
Even today the term
carmin survives in English,
Norman French, as the word charm.
And it still has the multiple
meanings of a magic spell,
a spoken poem and the
power to enthrall.
You are charming.
Looking at the sky this morning some
of you may have already
begun the day with a charm.
Rain, rain go away, come
again some other day.
A scholar might dismiss the
responses of average readers
as something vague and amateurish.
The reactions of most readers are
certainly undisciplined, haphazard,
incoherent and hopelessly
subjective.
But speaking today on behalf of
the amateur readers of poetry,
those who read it for love and
not from professional obligation,
I would claim that the deep and
genuine response of amateurs,
however conceptually incoherent
and subjective in conceptual terms,
come closer to the power of art
nearer to its truest human purposes
than does abstract
critical analysis.
The scholar's response may
be accurate and insightful,
but it remains deliberately outside
the full experience of the poem
which is physical emotional and
intuitive as well as conceptual.
It is important for us to remember
that literature has many uses not
all of which occur in the classroom.
But in all sorts of
places and situations.
Poetry would not be a
universal human practice
if it did not serve many large
and various human purposes.
Now in the western
tradition the purpose
of poetry has generally
been assumed to delight,
instruct, console and commemorate.
And it does all of these things
through a particular exhilaration,
a heightened sensitivity
of pleasure.
Poetry is a special category
of language, a way of speaking
that invites us and rewards us for a
special way of listening or reading.
The primary purpose of this kind
of language is to enchant just
as music enchants, to create a
mild trance state in the listener
to heighten the tension,
to relax emotional defenses
and to rouse our full psyche closer
to consciousness so that we hear
and respond to language more deeply
and intensely than we normally do.
To borrow Franz Kafka's more
violent metaphor about literature
in general poetry is an ax to
break the frozen seas within us.
The purpose of poetry in this sense
is to awaken us to a fuller sense
of our own humanity
and our own existence.
But poetry is a way of understanding
and expressing existence
that is fundamentally different
from conceptual thought.
As the French philosopher Jacques
Maritain observed poetry is not
philosophy for the feeble minded.
It is a different mode of
knowing and expressing the world.
There are many truths
about existence
that are best expressed
as a song or a story.
Conceptual language which is the
necessary medium of the critic
and scholar primarily
addresses the intellect.
It is analytical which is to say it
takes things apart as the Greek word
of the world [foreign
language] to unloosen suggests.
Poetry language, however, is
holistic and experiential.
Poetry simultaneously addresses
our intellect, our physical senses,
our emotion, our intuition
and our memory
without asking us to divide them.
The text may be frozen on the
page for easy visual inspection
and analysis, but the poetic
experience in itself is temporal,
individual and mostly invisible.
To quote Wallace Stevens, poetry is
a pheasant disappearing in the bush.
And when we encounter a
great poem by Emily Dickinson
or William Butler Yeats,
E.E. Cummings
or T.S. Eliot we experience
a visceral thrill
in the physical rhythms
of the language
and the sensory impact
of the images.
When the stars threw down
their spears and watered heaven
with their tears did he
smile his work to see?
Did he who made the lamb make these?
The poem is a spell that unlocks the
deep response inside us beyond its
paraphrasable content.
And it's hard to write a
term paper about rapture.
[Laughter] I now come to the
second part of my argument
which essentially a
consideration of a paradox.
If poetry is the most
ancient and primal art,
if it is also a universal human art,
if it uses rhythmic power and music
to move us in deep and mysterious
ways, if the art is actually a sort
of secular magic that
awakens a heightened sense
of our own humanity, then
why is poetry so unpopular?
Why is poetry so hard that many
instructors acknowledge they are
reluctant to teach it?
Why is poetry disappearing from our
school curriculum at every level?
And why has poetry
gradually disappeared
from public discourse in media?
And why has this happened
at least in Europe
and North America despite
huge ongoing investment
from governmental, academic
and philanthropic institutions
to support the teaching,
publishing, discussion, promotion
and preservation of poetry?
There are, of course, many reasons,
not the least of which is the
proliferation of new technologies
for information and
entertainment including media
that have usurped the basic modes of
song and storytelling from reading.
But there have also been
intellectual and educational trends
that have stunted poetry's
popularity and appeal.
Couldn't perhaps the way that
poetry is customarily taught,
the manner in which is it being
professed be part of the problem?
Poetry has always played a
significant part in education.
It has been used for millennia
at every level of instruction.
In many cases poetry served
as the central subject matter
of the curriculum as, for example,
in the schools attended by Du Fu
in China or William
Shakespear in England.
But until about 1920 poetry
was taught rather badly.
It was used to teach grammar, to
teach elocution, to teach rhetoric,
to teach history, even to instill
patriotic and religious morality.
It was chanted in chorus by
young ladies in female academies.
It was copied to teach cursive
handwriting and calligraphy.
It was memorized as a
punishment for wayward schoolboys,
and it was recited by children
at public gatherings
and family parties.
Yes, for thousands of years
poetry was taught badly,
and consequently it
was immensely popular.
People loved it.
Poets such as Byron,
Longfellow, Tennyson
and Kipling became
international figures
who outsold their prose competitors.
But poetry's existence on the
pages of collected editions
or even best selling books
represented only a tiny fraction
of its real cultural presence.
Poetry was read in
newspaper, magazines, almanacs,
textbooks and popular anthologies.
A poet could become famous through
the publication of a single poem
across the world as in the case
of Edgar Allen Poe's The Raven.
Or Edwin Markham's now forgotten The
Man With the Hoe published in 1899
about the oppression of labor that
was reprinted in 10,000 magazines
and newspapers across the
world and made him one
of the leaders of the
labor movement.
Poetry permeated culture
at all levels,
and people of all classes
loved poetry.
Now, they may not have loved
the same poems that Dana Gioia
or Harold Bloom loved,
but they loved the medium.
What happened?
I think one of the problems was
that poetry became well taught.
As the 20th century progressed
some of the most brilliant minds
in the history of the English
language letters began to wrestle
with the early modernist classics.
They noticed some of the ways
poetic language operated,
especially the compressed and
illusively challenging texts of work
such as T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland
or Ezra Pound's The Cantos.
And they developed
interpretive methods as strong
as the text they analyzed.
They also disliked certain
aspects of their own education,
especially the sentimentality
and moralizing
of their Victorian era instructors.
These critics strived to create
a more objective, rational
and coherent way to
understand poetry.
In the United States this
intellectual vanguard included
critics like R.P. Blackmur, Allen
Tate, Kenneth Burke, Cleanth Brooks,
John Crowe Ransom and Yvor Winters.
These writers essentially
developed brilliant methods
of analyzing poetry as poetry
according to its intrinsic nature.
And they strip all the
extrinsic factors away.
They brought an analytic rigor,
a theoretical organization
and a philosophical detachment
to what had been previously
mostly an amateurish field.
Their techniques differed so
radically from traditional pedagogy
that they were called
the new critics.
And the best of these critics
area among my intellectual heroes.
If the immense success these
estimable thinkers enjoyed had a
long-term negative impact on the
popularity of poetry at least
in the United States the impact I
think was felt mostly in two ways.
First, the new critics and their
many successors changed the way
poetry was taught in classrooms,
first at the university level
and then gradually at
lower levels of education.
The emphasis on classroom
instruction came to focus
on teaching specific
critical methods of analysis,
increasingly the students
with limited firsthand
experience of the medium itself.
Classroom work became more narrowly
focused on critical analysis,
specifically visual, conceptual
scrutiny of printed texts.
Needless to say this process
represented a radical departure
from the pedagogy of half a century
earlier which had been eclectic,
performative and mostly
untheoretical.
The second impact was on
the profession itself.
The success of the new critics,
all of whom were poet professors
inspired three generations
of American scholars to focus
on espousing critical methods
as their primary means of
professional advancement.
Each decade brought a new wave
of critical schools and methods
and eventually a mostly theoretical
approach to teaching literature.
Each new method, however brilliant,
usually became more remote
from the actual holistic,
intuitive, musical,
magical experience
of the art itself.
Criticism and theory itself became
a mandatory part of the curriculum
which reduced the class of students
that actually took
on literature itself.
Trained in this system students
developed sophisticated strategies
for an art which increasingly
had little connection
to the experience of that art.
Now, please understand I
am not making an argument
against new criticism, critical
method or even literary theory
as intellectual disciplines.
My argument is about what
happened to several generations
of students whose classroom
experience
of poetry consisted mostly of visual
and conceptual technical analysis
of poetry without being supplemented
by other approaches to the art.
No one, of course, intended
this unfortunate situation.
Like most environmental messes
it happened by accident,
byproducts of an otherwise
positive project.
The rise of analytical
criticism seemed at the time
to be an entirely reasonable
development.
As Oscar Wilde once remarked there
are two ways of disliking art.
One is to dislike it, the
other is to like it rationally.
[Laughter] Although
art can elicit rich
and meaningful intellectual
response it is important to remember
that the experience of art
is not primarily intellectual
or conceptual.
It is holistic and experiential,
two words critics hate
because they're hard to pin down.
Poetry like all the arts
is a form of communication.
And academia teaches the art
as a conceptual discourse
like philosophy or literary theory.
This seems like a very
practical method.
The trouble with this
practical method is
that most people nearly all
of the time perceive the world
and their existence not as concepts
or abstractions but as totalities.
Poetry like all of the arts
addresses people as incarnate beings
with both bodies and minds.
Poetry is a way of communication
to which people naturally respond
because it's actually closer
to the way they experience their
own lives which is holistically.
They comprehend poetry as a
form of musical enchantment
which simultaneously addresses
all their human faculties
without asking them
to subdivide them.
We are not disembodied serifs.
We are heavy, hungry,
hairy human beings,
and we experience the
richness and complexity
of our existence more
naturally as stories
and songs than as syllogisms.
Now, let me illustrate this argument
with four brief personal anecdotes.
First, my childhood in Los Angeles.
I was raised among
working class people none
of whom had any higher
education and most
of whom were born speaking
Spanish or Italian, not English.
Yet almost all of them liked poetry,
not exclusively or excessively,
but they considered it
one of life's pleasures.
And they knew poems by heart that
they would quote unselfconsciously,
and they also loved
hearing poetry recited
in English, Spanish or Italian.
These were generally people
who were otherwise suspicious
of intellectual things.
But they quoted these poems, all
of which they had learned in school
or most of which they had learned
in school, with obvious pleasure
and pride because they had been
introduced to poetry as a musical
and performative art,
a form of enchantment.
My second anecdote is
about my own education.
By the time I entered high school
we were taught poetry mostly
as a close reading of a
text on a printed page.
We never read poems
aloud as a whole.
We read and analyzed them
line-by-line, word-by- word,
as clusters of meaning on the page.
The act of reading a poem at
least in class was to paraphrase
and then comment on
these small clusters.
A few years later at
Stanford I saw close reading
and other critical methods
applied with fundamentalist zeal.
If a student dared make a
personal remark about a poem he
or she was immediately corrected.
Such subjective comments were
considered embarrassing blunders.
My third anecdote occurred 20 years
later when I first began teaching.
I led a graduate seminar in
poetry at Sarah Lawrence College,
an elite private institution
outside of New York.
I had 15 graduate students, all from
good colleges, all of whom hoped
to have academic careers in poetry.
A few weeks into the course
we arrived at the sonnet.
And I asked each of my students
to memorize one of
Shakespear's sonnets.
The assignment was met with
resistance and anxiety.
Not one of them it turned out had
ever been required at any point
in their education
to memorize any poem.
They also did not understand
why it made sense for a student,
a student of poetry,
to memorize a poem.
But I'm mean, and I insisted
they do the assignment.
The next week when they recited
their poems their awkward utterances
hardly sounded like spoken English.
Shall I compare these to a
summers day there art more lovely
than more censored.
I realized that they had
memorized poetry on the wrong side
of their brain, as a visual text.
When they recited they were actually
reading some internal visual
text aloud.
But I had one student who
was a terrible student.
She had been in classes
with the other ones,
and they treated her
really as damaged goods.
When it came time for her she said
that she had not memorized
any of the sonnets.
I asked her why.
Well, she didn't think
they were any good.
This prompted a conversation.
I said, well, did you
memorize anything?
And she said, well, I
noticed that when Romeo
and Juliet met they speak
a sonnet to each other.
Did you memorize it?
Well, she said yes.
And I don't know if
you know this scene.
It's where Romeo touches Juliet's
hand, he asks if this is okay.
She kind of likes it so it's okay.
And then he tries to
get her to kiss him.
He compares her to the statue of
a saint and himself to a pilgrim.
The women in Shakespear
they're usually slightly smarter
than the men.
She picks up on the metaphor and
they play for it back and forth.
And so after hearing these sorts
of things I heard her [inaudible].
And she said if I profane with my
unworthiest hand this holy shrine,
my gentle sin is this: My
lips, two blushing pilgrims,
ready stand to smooth that
rough touch with a tender kiss.
Good pilgrim, you do
wrong your hand too much,
which mannerly devotion shows
in this, for saints have hands
that pilgrims' hands do touch, and
palm to palm is holy palmers' kiss.
Have not saints lips,
and holy palmers too?
Ay, pilgrim, lips that
they must use in prayer.
O, then, dear saint, let
lips do what hands do.
They pray; grant thou,
lest faith turn to despair.
Saints do not move, though
grant for prayers' sake.
Then move not, while my
prayer's effect I take.
And I was enchanted.
The entire class was enchanted.
And we went to the next person,
let may not to the
marriage of true minds.
[Laughter] And so at the very
end of the class I just wanted
to get the other stuff
out of my head.
Would you do it again, and she
did it even more beautifully.
From that moment the entire
dynamic of the class changed.
My problem student
became my best student,
and everyone else there realize
that she understood something
at the center of the art that
the other students didn't.
My fourth and final anecdote
is I think very positive.
When I became Chairman of the
National Endowment for the Arts
in Washington D.C. in 2003 I wanted
to make arts education a primary
objective to give students
and opportunity to
experience the arts
as a natural part of
their education.
As you can imagine this was
an immensely complicated
and expensive goal fraught with
legislative bureaucratic operational
and financial challenges.
But we decided to start with a
program that we could do quickly
without much approval on a large
scale without much investment.
Poetry is the cheapest art.
What we conceived was a national
poetry recitation contest
for high school students that would
begin at a class level the move
onto schools, local, regional,
state and national competitions.
We successfully tested the idea with
the Poetry Foundation in Chicago
and here in Washington,
D.C. But when we tried
to expand it the arts
educational officials
in 50 states initially
refused to adopt it.
They maintained that, one,
students hated poetry; two,
that memorization was repressive;
and, finally, that it was insulting
to introduce competition
into an arts program.
There should be no
winners or losers in art.
Everyone should share
and everyone should win.
As my kids say, KMN, kill me now.
There was a general
feeling among educators
that poetry was too intellectual
for the average student.
It took a great deal of politicking
that eventually we got
all 50 states reluctantly
to try the program for one year.
We called the program
Poetry Out Loud,
and we agreed that if we
failed we would give the money
to the states to do other things.
What happened, of course, was that
the program was a huge success.
Even though Poetry Out
Loud was poorly funded
and not fully available
in most states,
we soon had nearly 400,000 teenagers
memorizing and reciting poems
in competition at a local,
state and national level.
At these competitions the students
not only performed their poems,
but they also heard the
poems recited by others.
They and the rest of the audience
which was large audiences
including parents, teachers
and public officials were
literally saturated with poetry.
No one was more surprised by
its success than the teachers
and the arts consultants.
Students actually liked poetry
once we took it off the page.
The educators were also surprised
that the best performers
were not usually their best
academic students.
They were the problem kids, the
class clown, the sullen athlete,
the previously silent outsider.
And the teachers noted the energy
of competition spilled over the rest
of the course work as students
developed an increasing comfort
and command with great language
through the medium of poetry.
At the national finals I
noticed another surprising thing.
Year after year about half
of the winners were first
generation Americans,
kids from immigrant families
who had been raised speaking another
language until they entered school,
Chinese, Arabic, Spanish, Portugese,
Hindi, Farsi, Creole, Russian.
These were exactly the students
for whom literature
classes were most difficult.
That memorizing and reciting poems
provided them with a powerful means
of assimilating and mastering
English just as for thousands
of years poetry was
used to teach grammar,
elocution and spoken rhetoric.
This experience confirmed
my conviction
that there is still a
widespread appetite for poetry
if the art can be made
attractive and apprehensible.
I've covered a great deal
of territory so let me close
by summarizing my perspective
in two modest suggestions.
My first suggestion is that the
best ways to improve the teaching
of poetry is not to eliminate
critical analysis but to augment it
with experiential and
performative forms of knowledge.
You will learn something by speaking
a poem in public from memory.
These additional approaches should
include memorization and recitation
as well as creative
forms of engagement
such as writing invitations,
responses, parodies
or even setting poems to music.
Reading poetry silently
on the page year
after year is an incomplete
introduction to the art.
Rather like viewing the masterpieces
of Sisson or van Gogh only
in black and white reproductions.
One sees wonderful
things on the page,
but one also misses
something essential.
Second, critics, teachers,
scholars and even librarians need
to acknowledge and respect
non-conceptual forms of knowledge
which are fundamental
to all literature
but overwhelming so in poetry.
There are physical and sensory
forms of knowledge imbedded
in the rhythms, image and
verbal texture of poetry as well
as emotional and intuitive movements
in the structure of the art.
These are often difficult elements
to summarize in abstract terms.
But if we ignore or marginalize
them we lose precisely the magic
that makes poetry valuable.
We limit the appeal of the art.
As teachers, writers, librarians
we share a responsibility
to create the next
generation of readers.
We need to create and cultivate a
dialectic of intellect and intuition
of mental attention
and sensory engagement.
In poetry intellectuality without
physicality is dull and barren,
just as intuition untethered
by intellect quickly
becomes sloppy and objective.
We need to augment
methodology with magic.
What the hand dare sees
the fire, our hands.
We've touched the fire of the
imagination, art and language.
We need to pass that
fire onto the future.
Why should we settle for a
vision of literature, of poetry
and education that does any less?
Thank you.
[ Applause ]
Let me read a poem of my own and
then we'll take some questions.
I thought we need a
little poetic moment.
I was raised in a really rough
neighborhood in Los Angeles,
and I never really saw
nature until I was an adult.
And this is a poem about actually
the first time I ever understood
what spring was.
Went to northern California,
actually Sonoma County
where I now live most of the year,
and walked into an apple orchard.
And I was with a girl that I
thought I was in love with.
This is a poem called
The Apple Orchard.
You won't remember it the
apple orchard we wandered
through one April afternoon,
climbing the hill behind
the empty farm.
A city boy, I'd never seen
a grove burst in full flower
or breathed the bittersweet perfume
of blossoms mingled with the dust.
A quarter mile of trees
in fragrant rows arching
above us we walked the aisle, alone
in spring's ephemeral cathedral.
We had the luck, if you can call
it that, of having been in love
but never lovers the bright flame
burning, fed by pure desire.
Nothing consumed, such
secrets brought to light!
There was a moment when
I stood behind you,
reached out to spin you toward me .
. . but I stopped.
What more could I have
wanted from that day?
Everything, of course.
Perhaps that was the point to learn
that what we do not grasp is lost.
Thank you.
So any questions?
I've reduced you all to silence.
Oh, good, I'll give
the speech again.
>> You had mentioned about the
students that recited the poems
that eventually [inaudible],
almost reciting [inaudible].
It seems -- would you say that we
have an overall problem in the sort
of the business between the
written word and the spoken word
that keeps people to read
silently from the page
but they no longer grasp
relationships between the vision
of written words and sound?
>> I think that it's true.
And I generally avoided
teaching for most of my life
because teaching draws the same
energy that you use as a writer.
But for the last four
years I've taught
in the fall semesters
at USC in Los Angeles.
And I do think that my students
have two experiences with language.
One is their spoken language,
and the other is this language
they learn mostly in school.
And for a great many of
them you don't see that kind
of mutual enrichment of these.
And I think it's because we
haven't brought their speech energy,
their physical energy,
their intuitive energy
into their study of literature.
And the people that are
the best, interesting,
are a lot of music students.
Music students know how to do it
because they've learned to listen.
The acting students do it.
I have this huge poetry class,
it's the largest undergraduate
humanities class at USC
that were actually
in poetry out loud.
And a lot of these
guys are athletes.
And somehow they got involved in it,
they like poetry, and they wanted
to take another class in it.
But I do think there's something
about the way we teach language
that segments our experience
of different sorts of language.
Yes?
>> What do you think of the
quotation from Emily Dickenson
where she said something to the
effect when it takes the roof
of my head off then
I know it's poetry.
>> That's exactly what
I'm talking about.
It's a feeling.
That's why I took the Blake poem
because the Blake poem nobody
as fully adequately explain
what that poem means.
I mean there's parts of it.
But what happens is you have
this rush, it's physical,
it's imaginative, it's emotional,
and it's more than you
can possibly assimilate.
But it's this enlargement
of your senses,
enlargement of your understanding.
And that's what she's talking about.
It's when A. Housman says that
when he's shaving and a line
of poetry comes into his
head he'll cut himself
because his beard bristles.
These are physical -- Dickinson,
Housman are explaining
physical reactions in some ways,
physical sensory reactions.
Yes?
>> [Inaudible] granddaughter
of Robert Frost.
>> Sorry to embarrass you.
[ Inaudible Audience Question ]
You're asking two questions.
I'll answer the second one
first because it's easier.
I actually have an opera
premiering on Friday
that I wrote the [inaudible] for,
and I've worked with
a lot of composers.
When you hear them do the song for
the first time all you can think
of is, oh my God, what
were they thinking?
But the reason is what
happens is they take your text,
they remove your subtext
and everything else
and they make it their own.
And after I've heard it six or seven
times I know if it's good or not.
But my first reaction is always
like that has almost nothing to do.
The reason I read The Apple
Orchard today was because it was set
to music very nicely by
Lori Lateman [phonetic]
with whom I'm writing
the [inaudible].
But the point I was making -- I
could bore everyone in epic ways
with the technical
discussion of poetry.
The point I wanted to make was that
poetry and song were the same art.
They separated, and it depends on
what culture you're talking about,
either recently or a long time
ago, but that they're actually
at a root related in a sense to the
same sensory part of your brain.
Now, in poetry you tend to
create the music through rhythm,
through meter, through rhyme,
through assonance,
through alliteration.
Also imagery is a way as
the modernists understood
in which you bypass a
lot of the conscious mind
and you have very strong impacts.
But I think the experience is
very, very similar to this.
When you hear Russian poets read
their work they don't recite their
poems, they chant them.
The rhythm is physical.
Listen to some of the
older recordings,
the very earliest recordings
that were made of poets reading,
people that were from the Victorian
age, they chanted their poems.
And they were announcing right away
that this is not ordinary talk.
This is a special class
of musical speech.
But, of course, most of the
techniques that a composer uses,
a songwriter uses don't work
with purely verbal constructions.
This is one of the things that
makes Frost so interesting is
that he's trying to say how do you
take conversational American English
and tweak it in subtle
ways that you make it music
without people quite
realizing immediately.
That's one of the reasons I read
the Frost poem because every one
of those things could be just
a simple declarative sentence.
But it has this thing, and
it's got the hidden form
of [inaudible] as well as a sonnet.
Yes, sir?
>> How do you feel
about poetry videos?
>> Well, I think the
medium is natural.
The most important thing that's
happened in American poetry,
and I have to qualify this statement
because people misunderstand it,
in the last 30 years
has been hip hop.
We have seen in our own
time the reinvention
of oral performative
quasi-improvised poetry
which is I think the
word form of poetry.
Now, that does not mean that I
think that Snoop Dog is Shakespear.
it doesn't even mean that
I like most of the hip hop.
But what I see there
is a phenomenon.
We took poetry away from people,
and they reinvented themselves.
They reinvented themselves
out of their own experience,
their own language.
And, guess what, people like it.
It became within about ten
years the most widely purchased,
listened to category of
recorded sound in the world.
There's Mongolian, Finnish,
Urdu and people understood.
And they reinvented it because
the academic poetry had become
too remote.
This is also seen if
you wanted to say
in Marxist terms disenfranchised
western agrarian workers, cowboys.
Cowboy poetry went from
one thing to 200 festivals.
Little background music
for the cowboys.
And you see this, and it's basically
poetry slam, poetry videos.
People that are in a sense outside
of the official poetry establishment
have reinvented these forms.
Now, that being said as a
snooty reader of poetry I don't
like most of what I hear.
But, you know, the energy, the
authenticity, the cultural power
of this stuff is unmistakable.
And every now and then
you'll see a poetry video
that is simply astonishing.
People are always sending me links
and I see some things and I go wow.
[ Inaudible Audience Question ]
Well, that's very -- well,
my brother who is the smart Gioia
is a jazz critic and a music critic.
And he's written a book, a
very laboriously detailed book
about healing and music showing
the actual empirical evident
that this works.
But what it is is poetry was used
to chant and things as healing.
And the physiological thing,
and I can't explain [inaudible]
which is you have certain
rhythms in your body.
And by slowing down certain rhythms,
speeding up certain rhythms you can
help a person in terms of healing.
I would not give my medical
care over to any poet I know.
So I think this remains
theoretical, you know?
But they do know that music
in hospitals changes
peoples' attitudes.
People are very responsive
to these things.
Now, I don't think we've
done much scientific --
actually music and healing,
rhythm and healing is something
that is actually undergoing
a renaissance right now.
But there's no two questions about
it, it was fundamentally an aspect
of healing in oral cultures.
[ Inaudible Audience Question ]
We did a lot of -- when
I was at the [inaudible]
which was a while ago we
did fund art and healing.
WE felt that it was -- the
question is how do you take all
of this tremendous energy and
imagination and richness that exists
in American culture, literary
culture, musical culture,
arts culture which the majority
of people do not participate in,
and how do you bring what this
group has to what this group needs?
And I don't think we have a
very good answer for that yet.
And I think that that's
one of the things --
I said poetry has many uses not
all of which are in the classroom.
And I think that we need to
bring it outside of that.
And my experience is that
people are actually almost glad
to give it a try.
Yes?
[ Inaudible Audience Question ]
It's interesting I just hosted
or co-hosted a German poet
who specializes in this.
In Europe this is a huge movement,
although it's very much a kind
of the established poets
doing it with state funding,
significant directors,
relatively big budgets.
And I've seen some things
that are amazing there.
In the United States it tends
to be much more ground up.
In fact, I've had a couple
movies made out of my poems.
I think it's a really powerful
thing when it's done well.
But movie is like opera.
It's the quickest way humanity
has ever invented to go bankrupt.
So you need to sort of develop it.
But I think it's a
fascinating thing.
And every now and then you'll
even see a commercial film.
About 30 years there was a film
called Stevie starring Glenda
Jackson and Trevor Howard about
the British poet Stevie Smith.
And it told her life story,
but about every five minutes
Trevor Howard would just be there
on a black screen and just
read a poem by Stevie Smith,
and it was really powerful.
And there's been a little of this.
Sometimes it's really awfully
done because they're trying
to wrap it into a commercial plot.
There's a movie about
the death about Keats,
Keats Romance with Fannie
Brawne, and it's unwatchable.
One more question and
then we can call it a day.
Sir?
[ Inaudible Audience Question ]
Well, there's quite a few.
I mean there is still alive,
God bless him, Richard Wilbur.
He's I think 93, and he seems
incapable of writing a line
that isn't perfect in some ways.
And in his 90s he's writing some of
the finest poems of his lifetime.
And they're deeply musical.
He's rather like Wallace Stevens.
His English has got sort
of the echo of French.
I think Kay Ryan who was Poet
Laureate here a few years back has
invented a wonderful
new kind of music.
And she now has legions
of followers.
In England, although I guess
he now lives in New York,
James Fenton when he actually on
those rare occasions he deigns
to write a poem, has got a
beautiful, beautiful ear for it.
But you see it in dozens
and dozens of poems.
Poetry is the Irish sweepstakes.
You buy a ticket and the
odds are against you.
But when you win, you
know, it's a big thing.
Kay Ryan and Richard Wilbur
if American poetry had nothing
but those two people in it today
we would have a rich literature.
But luckily we have dozens
and dozens of other poets.
Thank you so much.
[ Applause ]
>> Thanks so much, Dana.
And thanks to all of
you for coming out.
His books are for sale in the foyer.
Please do buy some.
I'm sure he'd be happy
to sign some books.
And please do check out our
calendar for upcoming events.
I believe we have an
event on Friday,
conversations with African poets
and writers with Veronique Tadjo.
So we'd love to see you there.
Thank you.
>> This has been a presentation
of the Library of Congress.
Visit us at loc.gov.